Primary Menu

Category: Programming

curl is an essential tool that most developers use, it will allow you to execute a wide range of HTTP requests from your terminal, it supports using a proxy to execute your requests, but it does not support PAC configuration files.

At my work I have to use a PAC file due to the large list of servers I’d interact with, and many would require me passing through specific proxies. It is a cumbersome process for me to memorize or try every URL I want to request and to identify which proxy to use, that’s why I wrote a simple perl script (yes perl not Python!) to help me with this issue.

This module solves a small problem that can be found in many sites, where the website has to support multiple countries, e.g. e-commerce website with different stores for different countries, this module allows the developer to define a context per thread, this context holds all the information about the currently available country, and allows the developer to rely on the context always to get the current country instead of passing it through the different levels of code. This module is thread-safe, it defines a different context for each thread.

A few days ago I was looking at my server logs, my website logs are more than a year old and growing, so I was reading some of them and wanted to download the old logs, truncate the logs, so that next time I read the logs I won’t have to look at very old data. So basically I wanted to rotate the logs and archive them, luckily logrotate is there to let me manage and administer log files in my system. It has a long list of features with a very easy configuration, so it was the tool I’m looking for. Continue reading “How to make logrotate use SSMTP”→

This is just a quick solution to put a timestamp with each line of the output of some command in Linux (*nix). It’s a very simple thing, thought I’d write it down here so maybe it’ll help somebody some day.

I have a cron job running on my server, it’s a high frequency job so I don’t want to send email reports each time, I’m logging it into a file, but I want to log the timestamp of each time it runs and logs something to this file, I didn’t want to change the code behind it to also print the timestamp with each write to the output, so I pipelined the command to a simple bash script that will append the timestamp to each line in the output then write the result to the stdout again.

Two days ago I needed to generate a PIL image that is made up from repeating a pattern – another PIL image – multiple times, I didn’t find a code online to do it so I just wrote this small code to do it, thought might share it to help somebody out there.

A while ago I was working on a project in Django that had many tasks that needed to be executed asynchronously such as sending emails, generating reports, and checking some database related issues.

Executing asynchronous tasks in Python can be made in multiple ways, one of them is using celery, a distributed task queue written in Python which has proved itself to be a great solid task queue system.

And if you’re using Django then there is a Django app to make your life easier, django-celery.

Now as always I like to make my own life easier also by implementing generic solutions for my needs, so I have written this simple piece of code to create a function decorator that declares the function as an asynchronous task, which means that by just adding this decorator to the function it becomes asynchronous.

I was trying today to generate PDF reports using Geraldo Reports and I needed to generate reports with Arabic text in them. Arabic is a very special script language with two essential features:

It is written from right to left.

The characters change shape according to their surrounding characters.

So when you try to print Arabic text in an application – or a library – that doesn’t support Arabic you’re pretty likely to end up with something that looks like this:

We have two problems here, first, the characters are in the isolated form, which means that every character is rendered regardless of its surroundings, and second is that the text is written from left to right.

I was working an Android application, and I had an activity that contains a map in it, the map is hosted inside a MapView. The application had to show some pins over the map, the pins locations are obtained from a web service. I had to retrieve the pins locations after the user pans the map or zooms in or out.

Google didn’t provide events for panning and zooming inside MapView class, but you can extend the class and do it your self, and that’s what I did.

It’s been a long time since the last time I blogged about something, and many things have changed since then,
I graduated, got engaged and moved to Dubai.
I have plenty of things in my mind to blog about, many solutions and many tools that I developed that I’d like to share it with everyone, but I haven’t settled down, and my schedule is not stable yet, so I haven’t got enough time to sort things out and start blogging, anyway this post is simple and it doesn’t need much description so I thought I’d share it with you now.

Now let’s move to business, so I was working on an Android application and I needed to log some debug messages, normally I’d use
Log.d(TAG,message); and this will send the message to logcat, but logcat is not useful for long messages, like for example if I needed to log the response I received from a web service, this response might be long and sending it to logcat will truncate it.